Maybe, but Google have plenty of tactical products which only have an indirect at best business model. Reader shutdown seems more a case of management vision. Under Page's reorg there are now 5 consumer facing units:
Most natural fit would be 1) or 2), but evidently neither Knowledge or Social wanted to pick it up. That leaves 3) as the remaining possibility through a merger with Currents, but that units already spreading itself thin.
In the end I think they really wanted to recapture the server cycles since even at Google's scale caching every single feed and creating a searchable index for each user is expensive (for this reason none of the online replacements are able to offer search so far).
They probably saw Reader as taking too many resources for its relative impact, and we know from the former product teams comments that even while work on it was still active the upper management was was never really all that effused about it at the time. Page's views didn't change after he took over so it was really just a question of when not why.
1. Knowledge (Search, Maps, News, etc) 2. Social (Google+, Blogger etc) 3. Chrome, Android, Apps 4. Youtube 5. Ads and Commerce
Most natural fit would be 1) or 2), but evidently neither Knowledge or Social wanted to pick it up. That leaves 3) as the remaining possibility through a merger with Currents, but that units already spreading itself thin.
In the end I think they really wanted to recapture the server cycles since even at Google's scale caching every single feed and creating a searchable index for each user is expensive (for this reason none of the online replacements are able to offer search so far).
They probably saw Reader as taking too many resources for its relative impact, and we know from the former product teams comments that even while work on it was still active the upper management was was never really all that effused about it at the time. Page's views didn't change after he took over so it was really just a question of when not why.